Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

Army Air Force

08/24/2012

Second Lt. Samuel Smith knew what he was up against when his B-17 bomber group got orders to strike a German base that was home to 16 of the war's newest planes, the Messerschmitt Me-262 — the first jet-powered aircraft to be used in combat.

“On the mission before this we went to Hamburg and there must have been 15 of them in the air, and I must have seen 10 or 15 bombers go down,” he said.

A few weeks shy of 88, Smith was honored Friday for his heroics on the mission that took them Hopsten on March 21, 1945. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph's Taj Mahal, a crowd of more than 80 people giving a long standing ovation.

“He's a representative of a generation of Americans that did something special,” said Gen. Edward A. Rice Jr., head of the Air Education and Training Command and himself a bomber pilot. “We were talking about the thousand-plane raids that will probably never again be replicated.”

The medal, which falls between the Bronze Star and Silver Star, was given decades late because a commander during World War II refused to sign off on them.

Long after the war, at a reunion, the commander admitted he was wrong, apologized and helped Smith get the medal.

Still, it was a bittersweet day. Only three of Smith's eight crewmen and a few pilot buddies still are alive. Still sharp, he's the only member of the crew who is mobile.

“Here it is 60, 70 years later and finally the award is being made,” said Smith, a Kerrville petrochemical plant consultant. “It's a great thing to me, but in lots of respects it's kind of sad because the guys who flew with me and helped are not here.”

01/03/2012

Jim Kirk and thousands of other Allied prisoners at Stalag Luft IV in what is now Poland heard Russian artillery in the distance.

If their hearts beat faster, there was reason. A German army broken by the Battle of the Bulge was in retreat. When the POWs got orders to leave the camp two weeks later, on Feb. 6, 1945, those excited by the prospect of soon being freed, ironically, lived one of the war's great unknown horror stories.

“Everybody was whooping and hollering and gathering their stuff up,” recalled Kirk, 87, of San Antonio. “They told us to pack enough stuff for three days. We're going to probably take three days to get where we're going.”

Lining up four abreast, the POWs left Stalag IV and covered 30 miles before bedding down in a field covered by ice and snow. Their journey turned into an 86-day march, with the POWs sleeping in fields and barns. They ate little. Disease ran rampant among the men, most of them Army Air Force noncommissioned officers.

Virtually every prisoner was infested with lice. Some ate bits of rats mixed with herbs in a dark brown stew.

As the column moved through the wilderness, at least 1,500 POWs who fell out of formation were shunted into the woods and executed.

“This continued on day after day, week after week,” said Kirk, whose weight fell from 159 to 96 pounds over 11 months of captivity. Decades later, he calls it the “Black March” and can't say why so few have heard of it. Others call it the “Death March.”